It's a sad day folks, seems Craigslist has been pressured into signing a deal with Attorneys General for 40 states to help them waste government money entrapping consenting adults who make a personal decision to trade sex for money.
Looking at that
photo op with the Craigslist CEO and one of the Attorney General just has such an ominous mob feel to it. It's so obvious they were bullied into doing this.
I say "government religious crusade" because that's precisely what this is. Making prostitution illegal has zero value to protecting people, and nobody has shown any useful arguments for it, probably because it's only a pseudo moralistic preference. It only sounds good at face value if you don't stop and think about it.
Most problems cited as caused by prostitution (human trafficking, violence, unsafe sex, STDs, etc.) are actually caused by the very laws that drive this industry underground.
If the DOJ wanted to crack down on human trafficking and child trafficking they'd open that industry up completely by making prostitution legal (as it should be) and going after the obviously bad stuff. What was that again? Ah yes, human trafficking. Read: "not" prostitution, i.e. exchange of money and sex between consenting adults. But that type of reasoning gets lost in the news bites and photo ops.
As with many such bills, this one was passed until false publicized pretenses. Per CrunchGear:
The official justification for all of this is to help eliminate human trafficking, especially that which targets children. That’s impossible to argue against, yes, but think of the non-trafficked individuals that now have to jump through even more hoops to do business.
Which to me begs the obvious question...
Here’s a novel idea: how about JUST “cracking down on human trafficking and child trafficking”? I think everyone can agree on that, and you don’t suddenly oppress millions of consenting adults with a bogus bill like this.
This is like the “pork” they hide in congressional bills, only worse because it blatantly oppresses millions of consenting adults.
Seriously, this isn’t the middle ages, the church shouldn’t be dictating our laws anymore.
Just to recap: Craigslist has an "erotic services" section, they obviously have no issue with sex workers.
Here's the article via
CrunchGear.
You'll note my eloquent comments there.
For example...
Oh good, just in time! We all definitely needed even more religion based law, oh, ahem, I mean law enforcement resources to prevent sex for cash between consenting adults.
Next up: they’ll be deciding if the man paying for a very expensive dinner on a date that ends in sex qualifies as “prostitution” although no cash is involved. Hmmm… a moral quandary indeed.
Be sure to check out the
prostitution discussion and prostitution poll of over 4000 people here on AskDanAndJennifer.com. Take the poll and let us know here what you think!
Your thoughts? Comments?